Become a Promotion Pro: 5 Event Marketing Strategies Every Planner Needs to Know

If you fancy yourself an event planner, you’ve found yourself in the right place.

Planning an event is one thing. Planning an event that people actually show up at is another. If you don’t know how to market your event properly, why even have one at all?

Marketing strategies make the world go ’round and it’s no different when it comes to event planning and promotion.

Here, we’re going to take a look at 5 event marketing strategies that you’ve got to know to make your event a success.

Planning Your Event Marketing Strategies

If you don’t commit to thorough planning before you begin marketing, then you’re going to flop. You need yourself and/or a dedicated team of professionals to take the marketing strategy seriously and get people to the event.

1. Social Media

In order to make your event visible to the largest number of people, you need to get its online presence in order. Promotion on all of the social media platforms is 100% necessary to create buzz around the event.

When you’re in the early stages of planning, come up with a catchy name for the event. Something that people will find immediately intriguing. If you have a good name, people will take notice.

You can start posting on social media while you’re planning. Leaking out the names of speakers as you confirm them is a good tactic leading up to the event to keep people engaged.

2. Create Flyers and Posters

This is an old school marketing strategy, but it works. You should have someone on your team that has a graphic design background or have hired a graphic designer. If you can’t afford one, you can try out a free flyer template online and make them yourself.

Regardless, have these flyers printed out and put all over your town; on bulletin boards, on streetlights, in coffee shops, etc. There’s no limit to the amount of good handing out flyers can do.

Custom printing is extremely affordable and with a good looking poster or flyer, potential attendees will take notice.

3. Video Promotion

Leading up to your event, you should be releasing videos along with speaker announcements to create awareness. Simple video updates are useful, but it’s good to entice people by making the videos more than that.

If you’ve got speakers, you can film short segments where you conduct interviews with them to give attendees insight into what the speaker will be discussing. Most smartphones have decent cameras in them now, so you just need to film.

If you’re familiar with video editing software, then you can edit the videos to make them more professional, but a straight-to-YouTube video will work in event promotion.

4. Radio Spot

Secure an interview on a local radio station that you know has the right listenership for your demographic. Talk about your event and highlight all of the exciting things that are going on. This is an invaluable tactic leading up to your event to create buzz.

Make sure to make note of ticket prices and the time and place of the event so that people know the when and where of it all.

5. Free Tickets

Finally, in the days prior to the event, do a few ticket giveaways to amplify the importance of the event. This can be done very simply over your social media accounts. Giving away tickets provides a sense of officiality to the event.

If ticket sales are low and you’re concerned about attendance, you can give away more tickets than you let on in public, behind the scenes. Hold small contests every day to try and create enthusiasm among attendees. Hopefully, this will create some word-of-mouth buzz for the event and sell more tickets.

Never Stop Promoting

It’s important for the success of your event to never stop coming up with new and fresh event marketing strategies. These are the basics, but you can get extremely creative and fun with your ideas.

The goal is to get people to your event, so do whatever you have to do to make that happen.